Haptik co-founder launches $75 million Activate fund for early-stage AI startups in India

Summary

Aakrit Vaish, co-founder of conversational AI firm Haptik, and former Together Fund principal Pratyush Choudhury have launched Activate, a $75 million venture fund focused on deep-tech and AI founders in India at the inception stage. The fund plans to invest $500,000–$3 million per startup and is backed by prominent AI ecosystem figures including Vinod Khosla, Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Ashish Vaswani (Essential AI) and others, signaling growing capital concentration around India’s AI stack from applications down to accelerated compute.